The Oscar Producers Promise It Won’t Drag On Forever This Year

The 1974 Oscars, which unfolded against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal, are best remembered for the streaker who ran across the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, interrupting co-host David Niven. “If one is reading the newspapers or watching the news, it’s quite obvious that the whole world is having a nervous breakdown,” Niven said, just before the streaker, a conceptual artist and gay-rights activist named Robert Opel, burst onto the stage. In 2017, the nervous-breakdown metaphor resonates, and this year’s Oscar producers can only hope for such a memorable moment of self-expression.

Hello from Los Angeles, where we’re talking to first-time Oscar voters, keeping an eye on the E.E.O.C., and sharpening our talons for Feud: Bette and Joan.

OSCAR PRODUCERS: ORIGIN STORIES

First-time Oscar producers Mike De Luca and Jennifer Todd have given their first big interviews, to The New York Times’s Brooks Barnes and Deadline’s Mike Fleming. Telecast watchers can expect “a clip-heavy show that displays how movies of the past have inspired the current generation, a show that doesn’t have extraneous musical numbers, a show that is just a joyous celebration,” Todd told Barnes. One promising anecdote from the Times piece—they both spontaneously quote Tootsie.

By John Salangsang/A.P.

De Luca told Fleming how much timing the show—a notoriously difficult task—has been on their minds. “Right now, before I go to sleep, all I think is, ‘Our last commercial has to be before midnight; our last commercial has to be before midnight.’ ”

Barnes goes deep on De Luca’s backstory in particular. A well-respected producer of such movies as The Social Network and Fifty Shades of Grey, De Luca has a colorful, N.S.F.W. past, and, as Barnes writes, “Going from notorious partyer to entrusted shepherd of the priggish Academy Awards has to be one of moviedom’s bigger personal turnarounds.” Because I moved to L.A. after everyone had switched from the hard stuff to Starbucks, I missed some epic-sounding Oscar parties, including the 1998 William Morris soiree that thrust De Luca into the papers. And I do mean thrust. For a walk down memory lane, here’s Claudia Eller and James Bates’s 1998 L.A. Timespiece about that infamous night.

NEWBIE VOTERS

It is often at this point in awards season when I begin to need a cynicism cure. I found one in interviewing 11 first-time Oscar voters, all of whom were invited to join the Academy last June as part of its largest and most diverse class in history. Consider, for instance, Saudi director Haifaa al-Mansour, who told me, “Growing up in Saudi Arabia, women aren’t allowed to go into video-rental places. I would wait outside, and the guy would bring me a catalog to look through to pick out movies. So you can imagine how excited I get every time a screener shows up at my house now!” Or Mexican-American animator Jorge Gutierrez, who plans to fly his mother up from Tijuana to watch the show. Or Kansas-born makeup artist Beverly Jo Pryor, who, after 26 years in the industry, is getting her first say in best picture and will watch the results with a glass of wine from Chicago, where she’s shooting Empire.

With 683 new members, this is undoubtedly a different Academy than has ever voted before.

ABOUT THAT MUSEUM

Geez, this $400 million museum on Wilshire Blvd. is taking almost as long as my bathroom renovation! According to Deadline’s Michael Cieply, the Academy Museum opening date has been pushed back again, to 2019. Renzo Piano must be using my contractor.

E.E.O.C. TO STUDIOS: YOU FAILED

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation into gender bias in the hiring of directors has now ended, and is in its settlement phase, with lawsuits potentially to follow, according to Deadline’s David Robb. “Every one of the major studios has received a charge contending that they failed to hire women directors,” Robb says a source told him.

KAREEM ON MIA, SEBASTIAN, AND KEITH

If you’re only going to read one thinkpiece about La La Land, why not make it Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s? The six-time N.B.A. M.V.P. and newly minted Hollywood Reporter contributing editor has some interesting observations about the movie’s views on race (“The white guy wants to preserve the black roots of jazz while the black guy is the sellout?”) and love (“The whole childish doomed-romance genre celebrates personal achievement with only an obligatory sad nod toward the consequences”). Also Abdul-Jabbar uses the word “boffo,” which for some reason just tickles me.

FROM INGRID TO EMMA

A sweet pink halter dress Ingrid Bergman wore in a 1939 screen test helped inspire Oscar-nominated La La Land costume designer Mary Zophres. VF.com’s Julie Miller has an interview with Zophres, who has the noble goal of inspiring us all to ditch our yoga pants and dress up more, and a video of that lovely screen test.

WHAT IS THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF B?

I already know what I’m doing the week after the Oscars, and it involves a sheet mask, pajamas, and F/X’s Feud: Bette and Joan, which premieres March 5. VF.com critic Richard Lawson got an early look at the series, in which Susan Sarandon plays Bette Davis and Jessica Lange is Joan Crawford during the acrimonious making of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Lawson also lunched with the series’s actresses at the Rainbow Room in New York on Tuesday. His appraisal: the show has a “a dark, juicy pull” but is “not quite the rip-snorting bitch fest some may be hoping for.”

TELL THAT TO BEYONCÉ

Recording Academy president Neil Portnow does not think the Grammys have a race problem. As VF.com’s Yohana Destawrites, “The Motion Picture Academy has stepped up efforts in recent years to increase the diversity of its voting membership and to update its rules as a way to tackle racial inequality at the awards show. . . . But Portnow doesn’t think the Grammys need to make the same level of effort.” “Well, they may have had a problem,” Portnow told Pitchfork, referring to the film Academy. “We don’t have that kind of an issue in that same fashion.”

IS IT TIME TO TAKE HAN SOLO’S KEYS?

The F.A.A. is investigating Harrison Ford’s close call with a 737 passenger jet at John Wayne Airport on Tuesday. “Was that airliner meant to be underneath me?” Ford allegedly asked an air traffic controller, according to the L.A. Times’s Hugo Martin, Veronica Rocha, and Richard Winton.

That’s the news for this sunny Wednesday in L.A. What are you seeing out there? Send tips, comments, and 1998 Oscar party invitations to rebecca_keegan@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter @thatrebecca.